Hi! We will present below a tutorial on how to carry out searches on the VHL portal, including the search interface resources, available services and guidelines for building a good search strategy.
The VHL Regional Portal was developed by BIREME/PAHO/WHO to provide easier access to information and evidence in the main databases in the health area. The VHL Regional Portal is available free of charge in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French. To access it, click the button below.
Search operators tell the system how to organize your search terms.
They are: AND, OR and AND NOT.
To facilitate the visualization in the search expression, it is important that these are written in capital letters.
The AND search operator combines the terms so that they are all retrieved in the same document. As this operator is the system standard, its typing between the terms is optional.
The OR search operator combines terms by retrieving at least one of them in the document. The OR operator must be entered between the terms.
Terms typed after the AND NOT search operator are excluded from the search result
The VHL search system processes searches in a sequence from left to right. Use parentheses to "arrange" different operators in the search strategy.
This is an advanced search feature that can be used to compose the search expression.
The search fields are represented by codes that, applied before terms, descriptors or phrases, tell the system to retrieve them according to the informed field, such as subject, title, author, abstract, publication date, country, etc..
The search syntax to retrieve a specific field must be constructed with the field code followed by : (colon).
Check the example:
mh:dengue AND ti:"tropical diseases" AND da:2021*
where mh represents the subject descriptor search field, ti the title field and gives the publication date field.
As in the example above, it is possible to use different fields in the same search expression, providing greater precision in the retrieval of the result.
To view the fields available in the VHL search system and the application examples, click on the button below:
We can refine the search through the filters. They are formed from the metadata of documents or from search expressions made by experts.
You can refine search results by: Full text, Database, Main subject, Study type, Language, Publication year range or include MORE FILTERS in the top button.
Filters are available in the left corner of the portal. After doing a search, select the desired filter, then click FILTER.
Subsequent searches will be filtered until the selected filters are turned off or until your browser data is cleared.
After applying the filters, if you want to remove one or all of them, click on REMOVE or CLEAR ALL, thus returning to the original search result.
Search the VHL.
To save and forward the search result to your e-mail, simply fill in the form and indicate one of the options: This page, Selected references or All references (limit 300), and click SEND.
To export the results list to your computer or to a reference manager, click on EXPORT.
Select one of the available formats and the number of references you want to export (page only, selected only or all references). A file will be created on your computer. Remember to name the file and check which folder you are saving it in. This file can be imported by a reference manager.
The RSS Feed, or Really Simple Syndication, is a feature that allows users of a blog or news channel to follow their updates from search results.
XML, too, can be used to store data in files or databases..
Access My VHL at:
Access the VHL Regional Portal
